we found love in a hopeless place
by sweetwatersong
Summary: Love and life I will divide / Turn away 'cause I need you more / Feel the heartbeat in my mind / We found love in a hopeless place. She has an order she has never been able to carry out. When she finds her soulmate, she will kill them.


**we found love in a hopeless place**  
>rating: pg-13<br>characters: Clint Barton, Natasha Romanoff  
>warnings: canon-typical violence, gore<br>summary:_ Love and life I will divide / Turn away 'cause I need you more / Feel the heartbeat in my mind / We found love in a hopeless place._ She has an order she has never been able to carry out. When she finds her soulmate, she will kill them.

author's note i: For scribble_myname's prompt at the be_compromised 2014 promptathon: "Soulmarks AU where Clint has an hourglass on his back over his heart and Natasha has an arrowhead on her front over her heart. They come from different cultures though that interpret these marks differently. Soulmarks is just one theory on what they mean. Natasha recognizes Clint when he has an arrow pointed right at the arrowhead mark." This is Natasha's story - Clint's may come later, if I can get him to cooperate. :)

author's note ii: Title and summary lyrics from _We Found Love _by Rihanna ft. Calvin Harris. Many thanks to cybermathwitch for beta'ing and informing me the promptathon _hadn't_ closed while I was in the wilds!

_we found love in a hopeless place:  
>light through an open door<em>

Natasha stares down the shaft of an arrow, the pieces falling into place, and hesitates.

s

She is born blank, blameless, a sheet for the world to draw upon. She has no soulmate, no mark that could tell her whose path her feet may walk beside, no compass to follow her choices. One of the many, one of the few, whose life lies in her own hands.

It is not until she is taken by the Red Room at seven years of age that the bruise blooms on her chest and spreads into an arrowhead.

Natasha is never sure if she should thank them for that.

s

There are missions, and targets, and people she learns to woo and wreck with careful precision. From the beginning, she always looks for the sign that could tell her who would pull her fate alongside theirs.

It does not appear.

"It's real," the balding doctor affirms, pushing his chair back from the examination table. "Of course you know what will be expected of you," he continues as the nurse makes a notation on her clipboard and turns away. In the clicking hollowness of the infirmary the doctor's empty eyes rest on her adolescent chest with as little interest as if she were an insect or equation. "When you find them, you will kill them."

Natasha does not reply, her hair scraped into a bun and her thin limbs hanging at her sides while she sits for his inspection.

She knows.

s

Soulmates are a weakness, they are told and told again. An opening, an exploitation to be used by strange hands or familiar ones, a chink in the armor you have built. Friend or foe or lover, they must be eliminated; only then will you be strong.

And strength is what we require of you.

Celia finds her own soulmark in their fourth year of operating, eight years after they were initiated. She walks into the compound with her head held high and a head held in her hand, dangling from dark strands wound through her white fingers. There is a square of flesh clenched in her other palm, an ink-like bruise under her knuckles,and red stains upon the ground.

She is strong; she is brave; she is without flaw.

Natasha watches her go, blood splattered on the floor in her wake, and says nothing.

s

By twenty she begins to doubt that she will ever find her, find him. It is not unknown, not unheard of for the marks to ease like blows from skin or age like old wounds, and as she cuts unmarked and marked alike down she wonder what her sign would even look like, next to someone else's heart.

There is a brittleness to Celia's strength after that, the suggestion that with enough force her armor could be fractured though it has no open flaws.

Natasha sees, and waits.

s

Others bring in their kills, bodies or dark tattoos taken from cold flesh as proof of their success, completion of their missions. It is a parade of trophies, gruesome and proud and triumphant, and they go by her with straight backs or haunted eyes and promises fading from their shoulders or hands or ribs.

She is unlucky to be so marked, unlucky to never find her own symbol, unlucky to be in the ranks of the ones with futures they must be running towards.

Her hands empty, her heart unmasked, Natasha searches with an order on her lips.

s

Celia breaks in their seventh year, comes home shattered by darkness and desperation with her mind falling apart after four days of torture. She is brought to the bed beside Natasha's and leaves crimson footprints on the pale sterile tiles behind her, half dragged by black-suited guards at her elbows. The doctors try to run tests, the psychologist to speak to her, but she sits with her hands before her face and gibbers in choked words, partial thoughts.

Her eyes, when they turn towards Natasha, are wide and white and pleading.

She is gone the next morning, her crisp sheets empty and starched in the blank infirmary. No one needs to ask where she has gone.

Natasha wonders sometimes, when her ribs have rejoined and her heart is once again protected, whether Celia might have survived if someone had been there to cradle her broken pieces, to stay until she healed.

s

Others start to vanish, their dark arms or pale backs shadowed with broken futures, their resiliency lost in fear or pain or by their own decisions. She is left standing among the rank of new recruits and grim-faced survivors, among those who have followed their imperative and those who are just now learning it. Still she has not succeeded, though her hands are set to obey, her mind to follow the order.

When you find them, you must kill them.

Natasha does not know who 'they' are, but she still knows their fate.

s

The Red Room falls with smoke and flame and quiet appropriation by agencies she does not know. She emerges from the wreckage on her hands and knees, stands in the cool air at twenty-three and is finally free.

She is lost in the paperwork and ashes afterwards, a name that falls between the cracks and labels reading _presumed lost_, expendable and engineered to be useless without strings.

Natasha breathes in the clear air, takes the title she has not yet earned, and makes it her own.

She has time yet.

s

When the bodies and secrets fall around her, left behind her passage like leaves after a storm, she notes the rare symbols beside her garroting wire or exit wounds with clear and dispassionate grey eyes. Stepping over those corpses, Natasha imagines the people waiting who will now begin to grieve, the strangers who will never know why their hopes slid away.

Her strength is greater than theirs, her skills sharper, and it still isn't enough.

s

Natasha stares down the shaft of an arrow, the pieces of him rising like an outline in her mind, and holds her gun up in surrender.

His eyebrows draw together, his sharp eyes narrow, and she wonders if she will startle him like this often, in whatever they are meant to have.

The bullet that punches through her abdomen takes her by surprise.

She hits her knees, one hand moving to stem the bleeding even as she takes a breath, takes a firmer grip on her Sig, and with the painful clarity of adrenaline sees the archer start and slip the arrow from his string. "God damn it!" Someone, the agent, the man whose soul hums like a bowstring in the back of her mind, snaps. "What the fuck, Marcello, get the med kit!" But as Natasha follows his progress from the upper story, telling 'Marcello' to screw SHIELD's orders, she finds it almost funny that the shot she did not use on him has come instead for her.

He is there in time to grab her when she slumps to the side, his fingertips closing over the hidden mark under her collarbone, and suddenly there is another hand on hers, slowing the flow of red.

"Stay with me," the archer tells her. "Hold on." Natasha breathes, breathes again, and thinks yes, she will hold him, she will carry him until he heals, even if it is sharp and the edges of him cut her fingers, slice her palms.

"I will," she murmurs, her heart beating away under an arrowhead of her veins, and knows she will be silent no more.

s


End file.
